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Tuesday, December 29, 2015

Here's some more good news about THIS ANGEL ON MY CHEST:Kirkus Reviews has named it to their list of 11 Most Overlooked Books of 2015.Yay, I'm on a list...about being ignored! The book business is what it is, and I don't personally feel ignored. It's been a wonderful fall! I'm grateful--always--for readers who connect with my work, whether they are people who tell me to my face, who email or tweet me kind messages, or who--apparently--work at Kirkus and care about books and about this book in particular. Thank you, thank you, thank you!

Sunday, December 20, 2015

Oh, I’m so, so, so, so, SO far behind on EVERYTHING! Please
pardon this giant wrap-up of a million links all about me. But as a reward at
the end of this post I’m including an excellent holiday drink that I made all by myself when
Steve was away! It is rich and delicious and easy, and you know what? You
deserve it!

Biggest news of all! I adapted the first story in THIS ANGEL
ON MY CHEST into a non-fiction essay which is featured on the cover of the
Washington Post Magazine! It’s really a lovely layout, with stunning
illustrations. The web version is pretty—but imagine the print version being 10
times prettier!

THIS ANGEL ON MY CHEST was selected by Kirkus Reviews as one of 16 best short story collections in 2015.
There doesn’t seem to be a direct link, but if you want to confirm I’m not
making this up, you can click at the top to the “best of 2015” link and scroll
though the lists.

Combine the rum, powdered sugar, nutmeg, cinnamon,
half & half, egg, and vanilla in a shaker. Add ice and shake well. Double
strain [or simply strain if you’re as lazy as I am] into a chilled mug and
garnish with a dusting of nutmeg and a cinnamon stick. [Or decide you don’t
want to waste a cinnamon stick and you’ll be fine.] [Also, I actually served
this over ice in a tall glass.]

AND DON’T BE AFRAID OF THE EGG! IF YOU SHAKE IT ENOUGH, YOU
WON’T EVEN KNOW IT’S THERE!! [Think of it as adding nutritional value.]

Wednesday, December 2, 2015

I consider myself fairly title-challenged, so I was especially
interested in this article about where authors find their titles. (Side note: I
combed the Bible many times over looking for the right title for a novel
manuscript and came up with diddley-squat!)

…Consider Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust (from
T.S. Eliot’s modernist revelation, The Waste Land); Haruki
Murakami’s Dance Dance Dance (from W.H. Auden’s “Death’s
Echo”); John Kennedy Toole’s comic masterpiece A Confederacy of Dunces (from
a Jonathan Swift essay); Madeleine L’Engle’s A Swiftly Tilting Planet (from
Conrad Aiken’s “Morning Song of Senlin”); Cormac McCarthy’s No Country
for Old Men (from Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium”); E.M. Forster’s A
Passage to India (from Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass”); David Foster
Wallace’s sprawling Infinite Jest (from Hamlet,
which, by itself, has provided titles for dozens of novels). And the richness
of Hamlet is hardly Shakespeare’s only contribution to the
world of titles. The Bard’s oeuvre has inspired countless writers to plunder
from his seemingly endless riches, from Joyce Carol Oates (New Heaven, New
Earth) to Edith Wharton (The Glimpses of the Moon), from Isaac
Asimov (The Gods Themselves) to Dorothy Parker (Not So Deep as a Well).
If imitation is indeed the sincerest form of flattery, it isn’t hard to see how
our most ambitious authors hope to create seriousness and clarify intent by
echoing the elder masters in a legitimizing osmosis-by-title….

Monday, November 30, 2015

One of the great writing opportunities in the DC area is the
FREE Jenny McKean Moore Community Workshop offered through George Washington
University. This year it will be fiction classes, and the application deadline
is DECEMBER 30. I took one of these workshops many years ago and had a great
experience

Note: For reasons unknown to me, this info is not posted on
a website, so this really IS all you need to know to apply.

The George Washington University

Jenny McKean Moore Free Community Fiction Workshop

Tuesdays, 7:00 – 9:00 p.m.

January 19 to April 19

Led by Kseniya Melnik

Come and take part in a semester-long fiction workshop! To
apply, you do not need academic qualifications or publications. The class will
include some readings of published writings (primarily short stories), but will
mainly be a roundtable critique of work submitted by class members. There are
no fees to participate in the class, but you will be responsible for making
enough copies of your stories for all fifteen participants. Students at
Consortium schools (including GWU) are not eligible.

To apply, please submit a brief letter of interest and a
sample of your writing, 12 pt type, double spaced, and no more than 7 pages in
length. Make sure you include your name, address, home and work telephone
numbers, and email address for notification. Application materials will not be
returned, but will be recycled once the selection process is completed.
Applications must be received at the following address by close of business on Wednesday,
December 30, 2015.

JMM Fiction Workshop

Department of English

The George Washington University

801 22nd Street, NW (Suite 760)

Washington, DC 20052

All applicants will be notified by email of the outcome of
their submissions no later than January 16, 2016.

Kseniya Melnik is the 2015-16 Jenny McKean Moore
Writer-In-Washington at The George Washington University. Her debut book is the
linked story collection Snow in May, which
was short-listed for the International Dylan Thomas Prize and long-listed for
the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. Born in Magadan, Russia,
she moved to Alaska in 1998, at the age of 15. She received her MFA from New
York University. Her work has appeared in The
Brooklyn Rail, Epoch, Esquire (Russia), Virginia Quarterly Review, Prospect
(UK), and was selected for Granta’s
New Voices series.

Monday, November 23, 2015

I thought this was an amusing report from attending a
marathon reading of Moby-Dick:

...The inaugural event occurred in 2012 and took place in three
independent bookstores over the course of three days. There are other readings
across the country, as the New York Timesnoted, “with bearded, bespectacled acolytes flocking to
seaside ports, sipping from thermoses of grog and readjusting their sweaters at
the podium,” but this event was New York City’s first. This year, the event was
compacted into two days and delivered before Frank Stella’s Melville-inspired
sculptures. At this point, I think it is important to note the origins of the
word “marathon”: a feat of endurance that resulted in immediate death….

Here’s a nice review of THIS ANGEL ON MY CHEST on BookBrowse…and
it was selected as the Editor’s Choice! Because the review is posted for non-subscribers
only for a week, I’m going to cheat and include the entire text here:

Exploring the many facets of grief through fiction in a
variety of formats and voices, This Angel on My Chest deserves
a wide audience.

Leslie Pietrzyk draws on her own experiences in This
Angel on My Chest, a collection of loosely connected short stories, each of
which features a young widow. Pietrzyk, whose husband died of a heart attack at
the age of 37, deftly explores the various aspects of grief she endured
following the tragedy, some aspects of which continue to affect her more than a
decade later.

The book is fictional, but the author has said that
she made a point of including at least "one hard, true thing" in each
story, tiny details that would never occur to someone who hasn't gone through a
deep loss. For example, in one of the stories she talks about her husband's
love for malted milk balls – and regret after his death that she more
frequently bought peanut M&Ms because they were her favorite.
So while the tales feature different women in different circumstances, each has
an underlying ring of truth that blurs the line between fact and fiction. In
some of the stories Pietrzyk does seem to talk directly to her husband but
whether it's the fictional spouse lost by the character or the real-life
equivalent the author lost, it's impossible to tell.

Unsurprisingly This Angel on My Chest is very touching but the
feelings expressed aren't limited to sorrow. They instead cycle through a whole
gamut of emotions such as anger, fear, confusion and depression. The book is
outward looking too, exploring characters' reactions to their husbands' deaths
and the responses of those around the women, rather than depicting any of them
as objects of pity.

It made me more appreciative of the people in my life, and also caused me to
pause and wonder what I'd miss about them should they predecease me, things
that I take for granted now. While I choked up a bit from time to time, I
generally didn't find the book overly sad or depressing. I was instead
primarily impressed by the author's ability to completely capture her subject
so perfectly. I've been lucky and haven't known this level of loss in my life,
but Pietrzyk's writing went a long way toward helping me understand what she
and others have experienced.

The author confines most of her stories to grief and the mourning process, only
making her way to healing toward the end of the collection as she seems to
apologize to her late husband for moving on. Given the fact that some healing seems
to have occurred in her life — she has remarried — I found it interesting that
she chose to limit her stories to the death of a spouse and its immediate
aftereffects. But even with this limited scope, the book doesn't become dull or
keep hammering on a single subject. The variety of voices, formats and emotions
is rather remarkable and keeps the collection entertaining as perspectives
shift from one account to the next. She moves beyond the standard short story
form by including elements such as a multiple-choice quiz and a list of foods
mentioned throughout the book. Neither of these formats sounds particularly
remarkable; what, you may ask yourself, is so exciting about a list? Yet
somehow the author turns chapters such as these into some of the most moving
and memorable parts of the book.

Sometimes Pietrzyk's use of perspective is confusing. In some of the stories
she uses "you," and I found myself re-reading to determine if
"you" was the narrator referring to herself (as in, "you have to
ask yourself if…") or if "you" was the narrator talking to her
absent spouse ("you once said…"). The same uncertainty occurred over
the use of "she" referring to an unnamed character in a chapter that
focused on more than one woman. Careful reading of these sections, though, will
certainly help avoid the disorientation I occasionally felt, and the overall
quality of Pietrzyk's writing makes any struggle through these passages well
worth the effort.

This Angel on My Chest is excellent from start to finish, and
deserves a wide audience. Readers who can get beyond their knee-jerk aversion
to the subject will find a real gem here.

I’m very pleased that one of my stories is appearing in the
new issue of The Greensboro Review. “Easy Love” is one of the stories I had to
cut from THIS ANGEL ON MY CHEST so I’m happy it found a happy home. Here’s the
opening:

Sunday was
Emma’s birthday. It was also my
birthday, and, unfortunately, Dan’s birthday, too. What were the chances of an entire family
having a birthday on the same day?
“We’re just crazy-lucky like that,” Emma used to tell people.

This year,
Emma would turn thirteen, I was going to be forty-three, and Dan—my husband,
Emma’s dad—had died last April, so he would be forty-five forever.

In the
weeks leading up to the “big day,” Emma claimed desperately one moment that she
had to have a party and claimed the next that all parties were “annoying” and
“stupid” and that she wouldn’t sit through one unless I gave her a thousand
dollars. I longed to spend the day
distracted by a chaotic sleepover or shepherding a herd of girls through an
afternoon of disco bowling, but the final word was absolutely not, no “pathetic”
birthday party for her.

“Are you
sure?” I said. “I think maybe we should
do something.”

“No party,”
she said. “No special dinner. No nothing.
Just no.” She was hunkered down
into the big leather couch, and I perched on the edge, watching the Caps’
hockey game. Emma wore the lucky “Rock
the Red” T-shirt Dan gave her during last year’s play-off run. Dan had been a hockey fan, had played goalie
in college, and while I could follow the action, I couldn’t care about the
outcome the way he and Emma did. Win,
lose, tie: there was another game soon enough, another season, a different team
to root for if yours wasn’t any good this year.
Not that I shared these scandalous thoughts. …

Unfortunately, the story isn’t online, but I have an extra
copy of the journal…send me an email with
your mailing address if you would like to read it. I’ll select one
person at random on Wednesday evening. Here’s my email: lesliepietrzyk@gmail.com Please put
GREENSBORO REVIEW in the header, so I can keep my inbox organized!

Saturday, November 21, 2015

What? You still haven’t tried my amazing Thanksgiving
stuffing? It’s not too late...this can (and should) be the year! Simply put, this is the
best stuffing there is or will be—take it from one who has eaten boatloads of stuffing through the years. I'm pretty sure this stuffing would be in the running for my last meal if I were ever on death row, if the prison kitchen would let me make it myself.

Cornbread & Scallion Stuffing

Adapted from the beloved, still-missed Gourmet magazine,
November 1992
(It’s actually called Cornbread, Sausage & Scallion Stuffing, but in an
uncharacteristic nod to heart-health, I don’t put in the sausage. See the note
below if you’d like to add the sausage.)

Make the cornbread: In a bowl stir together the flour, the
cornmeal, the baking powder, and the salt. In a small bowl, whisk together the
milk, the egg, and the butter, and add the milk mixture to the cornmeal
mixture, and stir the batter until it is just combined. Pour the batter into a
greased 8-inch-square baking pan (I actually use a cast iron skillet) and bake
the cornbread in the middle of a preheated 425 F oven for 20-25 minutes, or
until a tester comes out clean. (The corn bread may be made 2 days in advance
and kept wrapped tightly in foil at room temperature.)

Into a jellyroll pan, crumble the corn bread coarse, bake it in the middle of a
preheated 325 F oven, stirring occasionally, for 30 minutes, or until it is dry
and golden, and let it cool.

Make the stuffing: In a large skillet, melt 6
tablespoons of butter and cook the onion and the celery over moderately low
heat, stirring occasionally, until the vegetables are softened. Add the sage,
marjoram, rosemary, and salt and pepper to taste and cook the mixture, stirring,
for 3 minutes. Transfer the mixture to a large bowl, add the corn bread, the
scallion, and salt and pepper to taste, and combine the stuffing gently but
thoroughly. Let the stuffing cool completely before using it to stuff a 12-14
pound turkey.

The stuffing can be baked separately: Spoon the stuffing into a buttered 3- to
4-quart casserole, drizzle it with the broth, and dot the top with the
additional 2 tablespoons of butter, cut into bits. Bake the stuffing, covered,
in the middle of a preheated 325 F degree oven for 30 minutes and bake it,
uncovered, for 30 minutes more.

Serves 8-10; fewer if I am one of the dinner guests!

Note: Here are the instructions if you want to add the sausage: The
recipe calls for “3/4 lb bulk pork sausage” that you brown in a skillet. Remove
it from the pan—leaving the fat—and proceed with cooking the onions, etc. Add
the sausage at the end, when you combine the cornbread and scallion with the
onion mixture.

Tuesday, November 17, 2015

The Kirkus Reviews has named THIS ANGEL ON MY CHEST as one
of the best books of fiction in 2015. (Okay, there are a number of books on
this list, so you have to go to page 10 to find me…but there I am!!)

…After several months of NYC publishers telling me my book
was “too sad” and that they couldn’t deal with short stories, I spent a year
entering the top fiction contests. The same basic manuscript was a
semi-finalist twice, rejected four times, and won the contest I would have
selected as the one I wanted most! I share this in an encouraging way: cast a
wide net and accept that there is always subjectivity to the publishing biz….

Today (November 17) is my last public book event for the year. I’ll be at
the annual Authors’ Night & Book Fair at the National Press Club, selling
books with a giant herd of other writers, including “Shirley” from the TV show “Laverne
& Shirley,” Sister Souljah, the former White House chef, assorted members
of congress and senators and ex-governors, poet Sandra Beasley…to name only a few! Do
stop by—surely this line-up is crazy enough to be wonderful fun!

Leslie Pietrzyk reads from her collection of short stories, This Angel on My Chest. She is joined by
Jehanne Dubrow, author of The Arranged
Marriage, a collection of prose poems. The reading will be followed by a
reception and book signing. Free admission.

Jehanne Dubrow is the author of five poetry collections,
including most recently The Arranged
Marriage (University of New Mexico Press, 2015), Red Army Red (Northwestern University Press, 2012), and Stateside (Northwestern University
Press, 2010). Her work has appeared in Virginia
Quarterly Review, The New England Review, Prairie Schooner, and Hudson Review. She is the Director of
the Rose O’Neill Literary House and an Associate Professor of creative writing
at Washington College, where she edits the national literary journal, Cherry Tree.

Leslie Pietrzyk is the author of two novels, Pears on a Willow Tree (Avon Books) and A Year and a Day (William Morrow) and a
collection of short stories, This Angel
on My Chest, which won the Drue Heinz Literature Prize. Her short fiction
has appeared in many literary journals, including The Iowa Review, Gettysburg Review, New England Review, and The Sun magazine. Her work has been
nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and she has won a number of writing awards,
including Shenandoah’s Jean Charpiot
Goodheart Prize for Fiction. She teaches at the Johns Hopkins Advanced Academic
Program’s graduate writing program, the Writer’s Center, and Converse College’s
low-residency MFA program.

responsibilities include editing, limited admin, and the
possibility of design (an anticipated 6-8 hours per month); compensation is a
€200 honorarium, books, training, and support. Writers of color, LGBTQ writers,
and women writers are especially encouraged to apply. Applicants may be based
anywhere in the world as long as they have a reliable internet connection.
Deadline November 30.

Wednesday, November 4, 2015

What writer doesn’t feel like she needs more time for her
work? Shelby Settles Harper gets serious about becoming more productive during
her writing hours:

I sometimes feel like a loser when I think about how long
it’s taking me to write my first novel. Yes, I have a lot of good excuses
(writing it while earning an MA in Writing and while birthing/adopting/raising
three young children and writing it during my family’s three-year living abroad
experience). Perhaps I’m supposed to cut my teeth on one novel that’s a decade
in the making while other writers learn to write by writing two or three
novels…but none of those things makes me feel like less of a loser.

So I read a book on time management. It was awesome! It
turns out – light bulb! – that I’ve got a few bad habits that might contribute
to my slow pace. While I can’t control my kids’ sick days or school holidays,
there are many small changes I can make to be more productive…..

Thursday, October 29, 2015

Poetry in Arlington is quite literally on the move. The annual poetry contest Moving Wordsis now open for submissions. Deadline: January 11, 2016. The work
of six winning poets will be printed on colorful placards and displayed
prominently inside area buses, enlivening the ride for thousands of commuters. This year’s Moving
Words competition is juried by poet, editor and literary curator, Francisco Aragón.

Six winners will have their poem displayed inside Arlington Transit’s
(ART) Buses for three months between April and September 2016 where it will be
seen by thousands of riders. They will also each receive a $250 honorarium, and
will be invited to give a public reading of their work in April 2016 during
National Poetry Month. The Moving
Words Program was launched in 1999, conceived by award-winning poet and
literary historian Kim Roberts (co-editor of Beltway
Poetry Quarterly), who continues to consult with the program.

Poets who live in the D.C. Metro transit area and are over 18 years old
are eligible to enter. There is no fee
to enter.

So please come! Wander by in the afternoon. Stop by after
work. We’ll be there waiting for you. Bring girlfriends. Bring boyfriends.
Bring your holiday shopping list. (And on top of all this wonderfulness,
there’s lots of free parking plus a whole market full of vendors
downstairs–hear me, Salt & Sundry and Righteous Cheese?)

From Memory to Memoir: Writing Your Life's Stories(NOVA
Annandale). Explore the literary elements of plot, setting, character, and
theme, and use them to recreate some of the events and relationships that have
influenced your life. Instructor: Nina Sichel, Nov. 4-Dec. 16, 7-9
p.m. Call 703.323.3168 to register or register online at www.nvcc.edu/workforce.

The Smart and Savvy Writer (Fairfax County ACE). How do you know if
the "contract" you've been offered is a sweet deal or a scam? This
class will present lessons learned, from writers who've "been there,"
so you can learn from their experiences. Instructor: Joanne Glenn. Saturday,
Nov. 7, 2 p.m. - 5 p.m. Call 703-658-1201 to register.

Monday, October 5, 2015

I have a piece up on Literary Hub today, pondering why
readers always want to know if the events in a novel or short story “really
happened”:

As a fiction writer, it’s my job to fool you, to trick you
into thinking that something happened, that the woman riding the Greyhound with
the ring of mosquito bites on her upper arm exists, that the just-baked pie
cooling on the cork trivet on the table is apple not pumpkin. We want to
believe. That’s why we pick up stories, because we want to be carried off into
this distant world; what happened next, we whine, did the boy get the girl? So
why can’t you relax into the story, why must you ask the question, oh readers,
or wonder in the secret places of your heart, or pretend you don’t care but
then do a little research into the author’s life: Did it really happen?

If writers were leading the complicated and conflicted lives
they write about, they wouldn’t have much (any?) time for writing. We love to
think writers are more interesting than the average person, but I’m not sure
that’s true. Some are, some aren’t—just like average people. No one is average
anyway.

Readers are nosy. People are nosy. Part of the question is
simple nosiness. But only part.

Also, you really should subscribe to Literary Hub. Their
daily email pulls together the most interesting essays/interviews/literature on
writing and writers from around the web. And there’s always something you must
read on the Literary Hub itself…in short, perfect for procrastination! Here’s
more info: http://lithub.com/

Wednesday, September 30, 2015

Everyone loves a list, and today I'm featured on Shelf-Awareness with a list of some of my
favorite books and bookish opinions, including this, which will be familiar to
long-time blog readers who lived the Moby-Dick
experience with me:

Book you most want to
read again for the first time:

Moby-Dick by
Herman Melville. I read it later in life, having studiously avoided college
classes where it might be required, and I devoted a summer to the project,
self-shamed into tackling the Great American Novel. I read as a reader,
savoring the prose and not worrying about footnotes and English department
interpretations, and I often found my way to the pages at four in the morning
thanks to a bout of insomnia, startled to find myself immersed in a postmodern
book written before modernism was a twinkle in anyone's eye. I cried when I
reached the end as Labor Day loomed, and honestly considered starting the whole
thing over again right then. It remains the most majestic and perfect reading
experience of my life.

Tuesday, September 29, 2015

An interview about my new book on writer Caroline Leavitt’s
book blog:

“Grieving a loss, to me, is not getting back to normal and
carrying on as if nothing has changed; it’s understanding that absolutely
everything has changed, and finding the strength to forge a new path to an
unexpected destination.”

Friday, September 18, 2015

Feeling discouraged about your writing and the marketplace
at the moment? Then read this, immediately; the title is “Should I Just Give Up
on My Writing?”:

…It's not good to pretend that you DESERVE rare success, and
it's also not good to tell yourself that you're just another faceless member of
the crowd. You can empathize and connect with other writers and still believe
in some ineffable magic that wells up from deep inside of you. I sure as hell
do. Sometimes! But that still doesn't mean that you or I DESERVE SUCCESS.

We don't deserve MORE, you and me. We're lucky to be writing
for a living. Hell, we're lucky just to be here…. So what do we deserve? We
deserve to work really hard at what we love. That's a privilege. We deserve
that....

I’m distraught that I won’t be able to attend this reading on
October 4 at the Writer’s Center: poet Tanya Olson. Her book Boyishly
is wonderful, and the title poem is one of my all-time faves. You should get
yourself to this reading in my place—and thank me later. (Read one of her poems here
and learn more about the book.)

Sun, 4 Oct, 20152:00 PM - 5:00 PM

Emerging Writer Fellowship recipient Tanya Olson reads from Boyishly, her collection of poems.
She is joined by Nancy Carlson, who reads from recently published translations,
Abdourahman Waberi’s The Nomads, My
Brothers, Go Out to Drinkfrom the Big
Dipper, and Calazaza's Delicious
Dereliction by Suzanne Dracius.

The reading will be followed by a reception
and book signing.

Tanya Olson lives in Silver Spring, Maryland and is a
Lecturer in English at UMBC. Her first book, Boyishly, was published by YesYes Books in 2013 and received a 2014
American Book Award. In 2010, she won a Discovery/Boston Review prize and was named a 2011 Lambda Fellow by the
Lambda Literary Foundation.

Finally, no link, but I loved this description of the
writing process in Ann Patchett’s collection of essays, This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage. This is from “The Getaway Car,”
which was also released as a Kindle single, but apparently it’s no longer
available. Anyway:

…For me it’s like this: I make up a novel in my head (there
will be more about this later). This is the happiest time in the arc of my
writing process. The book is my invisible friend, omnipresent, evolving, thrilling.
During the months (or years) it takes me to put my ideas together, I don’t take
notes or make outlines; I’m figuring things out, and all the while the book makes
a breeze around my head like an oversized butterfly whose wings were cut from
the rose window in Notre Dame. This book I have not yet written one word of is
a thing of indescribable beauty, unpredictable in its patterns, piercing in its
color, so wild and loyal in its nature that
my love for this book, and my faith in it as I track its lazy flight, is
the single perfect joy in my life. It is the greatest novel in the history of
literature, and I have thought it up, and all I have to do is put it down on
paper and then everyone can see this beauty that I see.

And so I do. When I can’t think of another stall, when
putting it off has actually become more painful than doing it, I reach up and
pluck the butterfly from the air. I take it from the region of my head and I press
it down against my desk, and there, with my own hand, I kill it. It’s not that
I want to kill it, but it’s the only way I can get something that is so
three-dimensional onto the flat page. Just to make sure the job is done I stick
it into place with a pin. Imagine running over a butterfly with an SUV.
Everything that was beautiful about this living thing—all the color, the light
and movement—is gone. What I’m left with is the dry husk of my friend, the
broken body chipped, dismantled, and poorly reassembled. Dead. That’s my book….

Wednesday, September 16, 2015

Goodness! An embarrassment of riches over here, so let me
offer a few links and you can pick and choose or ignore altogether, as you see
fit. There will NOT be a test at the end—though if there were, because I’ve
been watching a lot of “Jeopardy!” lately, I suspect the answers would be in
the form of questions.

*****

First, I’m thrilled that Kirkus
Review has named THIS ANGEL ON MY CHEST as one of “9 Books You Shouldn’t
Overlook”--!!

I wrote a short piece for BookRiot about the books that I
read while grieving the loss of my husband. As I wrote, I thought about the
so-called stages of grief:

Denial

Before the funeral, a friend handed me a copy of A Grief Observed by C.S. Lewis, the
classic book about loss in which Lewis offers a diary-like glimpse of his life
following his wife’s death and his meditations on his struggle to understand
this pain. It’s a heartbreaking book, but I felt a sense of numb distance as I
read. This poor guy, I thought, he’s so sad. There’s no quick and jolly
conclusion, no “and then I lived happily ever after,” which should have
signaled something to me. But I was in denial, and this book let me rest there
a little longer....

My dear friend and writing pal Marty Rhodes Figley invited
me to write a foodie piece for her blog, so I wrote, “Love, and Welsh Rabbit,”
which includes a beloved recipe:

I didn’t realize that the death of a loved one brings along
with it an additional thousand tiny losses, some of which are not immediately
apparent. In my case, because I love to cook, and Robb (and I) loved to eat, it
turned out there were recipes I could no longer make because eating and
preparing those particular dishes made me sad....

In case you missed the previous post, I was interviewed by Barrelhouse editor Dave Housley about
THIS ANGEL ON MY CHEST and Patrick Swayze:

In each story in this collection, a young husband dies
suddenly. Obviously, that plotline (such as it is!) could get awfully
repetitive, so as my writing progressed, I found myself playing with form,
which was a stylistic departure for me (and so fun!)…

And last, but not least—but not linkable—the new issue of
River Styx, the fabulous literary journal based in St. Louis, arrived in my
mailbox. It’s the REVENGE issue (oh, juicy!!) and it contains my story, “Bad
Girl” (which is a section from my novel-in-progress):

…He wore a
blue shirt—nothing special, something vaguely denim with white buttons that
were more lustrous than regular white buttons. Faded, milky blue, soft to the
touch. Well, I didn’t know it was soft because I couldn’t touch it, not even
the sleeve, not even that way girls might laugh too long at a dumb joke, that
laugh the excuse to seize the guy’s arm. Flirting 101. But I
wasn’t allowed to do that with him, with my best friend’s boyfriend….

Monday, September 14, 2015

I’m happy to be interviewed by Dave Housley, one of the
editors over at Barrelhouse, which is a wonderful literary journal and also a
literary empire, responsible for—among many things—organizing and hosting one
of my favorite one-day writing conferences: Conversations & Connections.

I’m
excited to be taking part as a speaker at the Pittsburgh conference, which will
be held on October 10 this year. Participants receive a free book, a literary
journal subscription, enjoy a day of panels about writing and publishing, and
have the chance to meet with lit journal editors…and to top it all off,
continue the conversation over Boxed Wine Happy Hour! There is space available
if this sounds as irresistible to you as it is to me! (Oh, and only $70 for all
of this!)

Okay, the interview! I’ll only give a short teaser here because
I say lots of things about writing and about my new book. But I also answer
this question:

Wednesday, September 2, 2015

South 85, the journal of the Converse Low-Res MFA program is open for submissions:

We Want to See Your Work!

After taking a break for
the summer, South 85 Journal's editorial staff has opened its
reading period for its 2015-2016 issues!

We will be accepting poetry, fiction, and non-fiction through April 30, 2016.
We will continue to accept blog and visual art submissions year-round.
For more information, check out our submission guidelines.
Or visit our Submittable page to
submit now!

Monday, August 31, 2015

Because Sandra Beasley’s newest collection of poetry, Count
the Waves, arrived within the
slim period of time between the end of the spring semester teaching and the beginning
of my summer graduating residency, I had to relegate it to a stack of books for
later reading. Before doing so, though, I glanced over the dust jacket notes to
get a sense of the book’s focus. I was struck by a line in the third paragraph
suggesting that the poems in Count the Waves “illuminate how intimacy is lost
and gained during our travels.” Since my own travels these past ten years have
led me from the Midwest to the Southeast United States by way of New Mexico and
South Korea, both gaining and losing friends with each move, I felt certain I
would find resonance within the collection’s pages. At least, I reasoned, I had
something good to read when I returned home. When Leslie Pietrzyk later
approached me about interviewing Beasley, I was happy for the opportunity to
get to know the poet behind the poems knowing that the encounter would also
enrich my reading of the book.

As is often the case for writers in the summer, Beasley and
I had a number of obligations to juggle, but she was eventually able to carve
out time to graciously answer my interview questions. I found her responses
insightful and enlightening and am happy to share our exchange here.

1. Titles are often tricky for
writers, especially when it comes to entire books or collections. Can you
speak to the significance of the title “Let Me Count the Waves” and what
connection it has to the Elizabeth Barrett Browning sonnet quoted at
the book’s beginning?

The phrase, "Let me count the waves," first
appears in I
WAS THE JUKEBOX in "Love Poem for Oxidation." In that
incarnation, the "waves" literally denote the movement of water. As a
child, when I was out bodysurfing with my dad in Florida or North Carolina, you
had to "count the waves" in order to catch one big enough to carry
your body to shore. By the time the phrase was re-appropriated as a poem
title, I was paying attention to secondary connotations: the iterative patterns
of "counting" required by a sestina's repetitions, and the
"waves" of third- and fourth-wave feminism. That poem is very much
about struggling to position myself as a poet versus being a "woman"
poet. I was trying to figure out whether that demarcation is trivializing, or
productive.

In choosing what would provide the collection's title, I
wanted something with bravado, and in the imperative tone. I also got back to
questioning why the phrase "Let me count the waves" had lodged so
firmly in my head in the first place: the answer being, a ghost-memory of
reading Elizabeth Barrett Browning's sonnet, "How do I love thee? Let me
count the ways…." back in high school, and perhaps mishearing it to suit
my own purposes. When I looked a little more deeply into Browning's life--in
which a long-distance love inspired an overturning of everything, flight from
an oppressive household, and eventual happiness--I knew I'd found my
inspiration point.

2. Many of the poems in this
collection are titled after specific lines in The Travelers Vade Mecum, which is an important influence in
this collection. So many, in fact, that it is a little surprising to
find poems that are not overtly related to that compendium. Can
you provide some insight into how you decided which poems to include and
your method for ordering them? Are the “non-numbered” poems related
to those which are numbered?

The Traveler's Vade
Mecum series began as the solicitation for a single poem, for an anthology
that will be published in 2017 by Red Hen Press. I usually hate prompts, but I
loved the exercise as a way of thinking about intimacy over long distances, so
I just kept going and ended up with over two dozen poems, most of which are in
COUNT THE WAVES. The inspiring book exists, so my titles are a straightforward
representation of A. C. Baldwin's lines and the numbers assigned to them. But I
didn't want those indexing numbers to control my sequence, so the challenge
became to find an internal "order" that respected the individual
poems. It's not as simple as saying that the TVM poems are of one world, and
the non-TVM poems are of another. About half the poems in the collection speak
to a discernible, personal--I stop short of saying
"confessional"--narrative, and that category that cuts through both
groupings.

3. Though they do not announce
themselves, there are six varieties of sestina in your collection. Besides
an organizing pattern, they share inventive language and common themes,
almost as if they are part of a larger organization. What attracts
you to the sestina, and what other elements of form are at play in
this collection?

The sestinas aren't so much different varieties as different
stanza arrangements; I've kept the pattern of end words entirely intact, with
an approximately ten-syllable line, and always opted to include the envoi. At
one point, they were all formatted in the traditional sestets. But my early readers
were experiencing visual fatigue. They'd spot the shape of the poem on the
page, know "Oh, a sestina," and it would temper their subsequent
engagement. I understand the phenomenon, because I do the same thing; you start
looking for the tricks of the form, instead of absorbing the content. I changed
the stanza breaks as a way of tricking the eye.

I love sestinas because they channel the energies of two
modes I am also drawn to, parallel structure and anaphora, and lexical
repetition that approximates rhyme. The "Valentines" build upon the
interest in dramatis personae that I raised in I WAS THE
JUKEBOX. The best examples of the form, with Miller Williams' "The
Shrinking Lonesome Sestina" coming to mind, feel playful and absurdist
right up until the moment they break your heart.

4. Like many of your poems, “The Wake” incorporates
really wonderful details, like “dovebelly brown,” “caress the bend of
waists slendered by work,” and (my favorite) “still the silk jutting from
his pocket matches / the band on his hat,” all of which lend a sense
of authenticity and verisimilitude to this reimagining of Whistler’s life.
Each line contributes to the poem’s dimensionality yet maintains a
very satisfying pace that leads the reader to the poem’s conclusion. It
made me feel as if I gained some insight into Whistler’s experience of the
world and especially made me wonder how you were able to create that
impression. Do you have a background in art history, or does Whistler
hold particular importance for you?

I'm thrilled to have you focus on "The Wake,"
which is probably the oldest poem in the manuscript, though I did revise before
adding it in. The text takes many cues from a Washington, D.C. exhibit on
"Whistler and His Circle in Venice," which resulted in a 2003
book of the same name curated by Eric Denker. I had recently been to Venice
when I saw the show at the Freer Collection, and the delicate pastels and works
on paper made an indelible impression. Whistler is an interesting figure
because of his ego, his personal life, and his eye for the possibilities of
mass reproduction and distribution; he was the Charles Dickens of the art
world. I have always been drawn to ekphrasis and the visual arts. My mother is
a painter and a collagist, and my husband is a painter and photographer. In
another life, I could have happily worked in a museum to the end of my
days.

5. The title poem, “Let me Count
the Waves,” includes the epigraph “We must not look for poetry in poems”
from Donald Revell. While there is more than one way to interpret this
aphorism, can you talk a little bit more about where, for you, poems
come from?

In fairness to Revell, his suggestion is reasonable: Poems
should not be overly self-referential. They should not be smug in their own
performance. A poem should not reach for the low-hanging fruit of what has
already been deemed "poetic." Read in that light, I can agree with
him. But at the other end of the spectrum, and historically, one way upstart
voices have tempered the privilege and power of others is through enacting
verbal fireworks. So there has to be a place for a showy and brazen. There has
to be a place for that which will not be denied.

For me, most poems begin in the struggle to identify
something. I operate from an emotional or philosophical perception, an
instinct, without quite knowing what I'm trying to say. The irony is, once I
decide what I am trying to say--and the poem is not a mature work until that
happens--my craft is to articulate as thoroughly as possible. I thread a needle
with what I refer to as the bright particulars of the situation. Bonus points
if there is an opportunity for humor.

6. This is your third full-length
collection of poetry. How did your approach to this book of poetry differ
from your approach to your first book?

In assembling a third book, I was aware from the outset that
the pile of pages could be a manuscript. That is both a strength and weakness.
On one hand, I knew to avoid repeating the same images or stylistic moves,
because what provides satisfying closure in one standalone poem will fail when
you attempt to use it on three poems in a row. On the other hand, I may have
prematurely curtailed some ideas of drafts because they felt too far outside
the growing body of work. But overall, this is the biggest and rangiest
collection I've ever done. Though the theme of adult love is unapologetically
singular, that still leaves a lot of ground to cover.

7. What projects are you working
on now?

Well, to be fair--an author isn't "done" with a
book once it is out in the world! I'll be pursuing whatever combination of
readings, classroom visits, and other opportunities that I can find to get the
word out about COUNT THE WAVES.

But in terms of new directions, I have a proposal for a nonfiction
project, which I'll convert to a long essay if it does not find a publisher. I
am writing poems commissioned by the Southern Foodways Alliance, in
anticipation of an October gathering in my beloved town of Oxford, Mississippi.
I'm also in my second year of teaching with the University of Tampa's
low-residency MFA program, and I am really appreciating the opportunity to
mentor in both poetry and memoir, not to mention the appeal of getting to know
a new town with visits twice a year. And meanwhile, I'm settling into a new
neighborhood of Washington, D.C., with my husband. Life is busy, but it is the
best kind of busy.